Where is the love?
by sunflowergirl7
Summary: Scout befriends Boo Radley after the novel ends and begins to uncover mysteries about his already mysterious past that just may link him to the Tom Robinson case. Please review!
1. Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

Authors note: Please review, this is my first fanfiction story - I would love comments, criticisms and ideas!

It was a hot summer day. The air was so sticky and humid I could feel the tiny particles weighing down on my skin. An occasional breeze lifted the hair off my face, and my neck was exposed to the seemingly cool hair, but my entire body seemed to be bathing in sweat.

I was on Miss Maudie's porch, sipping a glass of lemonade, the majority of it ice blocks that were getting smaller and smaller by the minute. Miss Maudie was in the garden, attending to her flowers.

"Miss Maudie?" All I had to do was whisper and she heard me, the air was that still.

"Yes, Scout?"

"Where is the love?"

Miss Maudie pulled her trowel out of the dry earth and turned to face me, adjusting her sun hat over her face as she did so. It cast a shadow onto her kind face as she puzzled over my question.

"Now, which love would you be talkin' about, young lady?"

"There's more than one kind?"

She laughed and went back to digging in the earth with her trowel.

"Oh yes, child, many kinds of love."

"Well I'm talkin' bout the one that Boo Radley deserves to get from the town. Do you know which one that is, m'am?"

She stopped digging.

"Boo Radley?"

"Yes'm."

Miss Maudie considered carefully. After a moment, she spoke; "Scout, people call that one different things as you will learn as you grow older, but I like to call that the love that unites the people. It's the love that we share for each other, and the love that we share for the world. You think Mr. Radley deserves that love?"

"Well yes I do, Miss Maudie. He just sits there in his dark house all day and nobody talks to him, nobody looks, nobody even thinks about how he feels. It's like they don't like him at all, m'am, they don't share the neighborly love toward him you were talkin' bout. I reckon everyone should get that kind of love."

Miss Maudie turned toward me and I could see her thoughtful eyes behind the shadow of the sun hat.

She picked herself up off the ground, and then wandered toward the porch. She sat down in her rocking chair, glass of lemonade in one hand and the trowel in the other. Miss Maudie took a long gulp of lemonade and set the empty glass on the step, wiped the sweat from her brow and then spoke to me. It was barely a whisper.

"Some people aren't loved in this world, Scout. And the funny thing is that the people who aren't loved are the ones who need the loving the most.

You've got to be very brave to love Boo Radley. He's lost Scout, he doesn't have a real friend and I know he wishes so bad he did have one. You see how he put those presents for you and Jem in the tree? He wants to be your friend. And you know why that is?"

I studied her dark eyes.

"No'm."

"Because he knows you want to be his." Miss Maudie smiled at me long and hard, then leaned back in her rocking chair and closed her eyes.

I got up off the porch step and wandered slowly down the sidewalk. I wondered if Miss Maudie even knew I had left.

I thought about what she said.

Was it true? Did Boo want to be my friend? Did he need to be loved like a human being instead of regarded as an outcast, a ghost, a terror?

I had wandered to the corner and I stood before Boo Radley's front gate, hands in my pockets, my face in a solemn stare.

Then I saw a face.

A face in the window. It was a dark face, a lonely face, staring out of the dirty window pane; staring at me.

At first I was frightened, but then I raised my hand and waved it slowly.

A hand waved back, its small bony fingers glowing white in the dark window.

The face disappeared and I heard a noise behind the door.

Before I had time to convince myself not to, I ran up Boo Radley's walkway, bounded up the steps and knocked on the door twice.

Slowly it creaked open. A white face appeared way up above my head, the eyes dark and sunken, the mouth in a tight line. He was wearing worn blue overalls and a grayed checkered shirt. He was barefoot.

The depths of his eyes gazed down into mine.

"Hey, Boo."


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

**Authors note: I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this, but we'll see.**

Boo reached out his hands and I took his stark white fingers in mine.

He rested his gaze on the two empty chairs on the porch side by side and we sat down, him in the stiff wood-wire one and me in the rocking chair.

Boo stared silently ahead, his eyes fixed to a point far off in the distance, his body tense in the chair.

I was reminded of the time Miss Stephanie told Jem and I about the poor woman who stared so hard that her eyes became stuck like that and she walked around looking at people as if she were a hound on the chase, her eyes wide and focused.

I searched for something to say in the still air, little particles of dust floating around my head, illuminated by the bright sunlight. Finally I landed on something solid.

"Don't you just love the summer? Jem says God gave us summer as a break from school, but I think God gave us summer so we could be free and wild like the birds that sing sweetly in the trees, like the fish that jump right out up of the rivers; so we can run barefoot and scream and sleep out on the screened porch and pick flowers in the meadows and drink lemonade and eat ice cream when we get enough nickels in our pockets and—" I noticed a small tear running down the side of Boo Radley's face, almost dark against his pale skin. I stopped talking. His eyes were watery and he shut them for a second, sending a new cascade of tears down his cheeks.

I leaned toward him. "Mr Radley?" I whispered, "Are you okay? Why you cryin'?"

He didn't say anything, just kept his eyes closed and shook his head slowly back and forth.

I put my hand on his. "Mr. Radley, it's gonna be okay, you can talk to me, you know, but if you don't want that's okay too, we could just sit here."

Boo opened his eyes and smiled at me. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came out. He tried again, and when he spoke his voice was deep and raspy; a kind fatherly tone.

"Of all things in this confusing world little girls are the ones that love the most. Did you know that?"

"Why no I didn't Mr. Radley."

"Now let me show you somethin'." Boo got to his feet, swaying a little bit from the motion, and stepped heavily inside his door. Hedisappeared from my sight.

After a moment, Boo stepped out once more, holding tightly in his grasp a large folder, dirtied with charcoal pencil marks gone astray. He sat down in his chair and placed the folder softly on my lap.

I looked at him curiously.

"Open it," he instructed, waving his hand.

I opened the folder slowly and as I did so a slip of paper fell out, blackened in one corner as if someone had tried to burn it.

It was a message; a message to Boo:

My Dearest Arthur,

I'm sorry that it must end this way. I didn't plan for it, I swear, Arthur, I do.

Yet I know you will no believe me.

The rumors are just too harsh for our little Ella. Don't you see? This is the only way. It has to be done.

I know you didn't do it, I always will. But I have to go. Alone. Ella must remain here, for reasons only I can ever know.

She will be given to a family in town. You must _never _see her again.

I'm sorry, Arthur.

Yours, Evelyn

I must have read the note over one hundred times, puzzling over each perfectly scripted word, each sentence, how they fit together, because Boo finally tapped me on the shoulder.

"Miss Scout?"

"Mr. Radley," I said in a bewildered tone, "What is this?"

"Please look inside." He turned away once more, staring at that fixed point in the distance, his eyes wide like a frightened child.

I opened the folder, expecting more letters, but instead my eyes were met with a stack of black charcoal drawings. Thirty of them maybe, all lying haphazardly on top of each other.

The one on top was very eerie. It depicted a small flower, maybe a wild dandelion, lying lifeless in someone's opened palm. And in the middle of the flower head: an eye. The saddest eye I had ever seen. The drawing looked so real, each shadow, each detailed pencil mark so beautiful and precise. Yet the eye was so sad, so forgotten, so lost. And the flower so lifeless.

I turned over to the next drawing. And the next. And the next. Around the next twenty or so drawings were of different corners of different rooms, all from different angles. Some were up close, some were very far away, making the corner look so tiny. Some had a lone chair in them, some were from above, some were from below. One had the flower with the eye lying in it. But each was, like the flower one, so real and so precise. I couldn't believe someone of Boo's size could have depicted and drawn each precise line, each detailed part.

I couldn't believe Boo was an artist.

I skipped past the corner drawings and came upon a small set of 3 drawings. The first was a beautiful baby girl lying on a carpet, her dark eyes twinkling, her mouth open in a smile. I could almost hear her laughing. In her hair was a single red flower, seeming to bend in an unseen wind throughout the little girls flowing hair. The red was the only color in the scene.b The next drawing was the same girl, with the same red bending flower in her hair, only now the girl was older, maybe ten years old. She was missing one of her front teeth. She had the same huge beautiful smile, the same twinkling dark eyes. Her hair was in two braids. The final drawing showed the same girl once more, with the same red flower in her hair bending in the wind. She was laughing, her eyes were twinkling, her hair loose and swirling around her face. There was something about her that I recognized...

And then, just like that, it all made sense; the red geranium in her hair; the letter; Evelyn; the rumors.

I gasped, dropping the folder, clutching the final drawing of Mayella Ewell in my hand.

Only, in this drawing, she was not Mayella Ewell.

She was Ella Radley.

And she was Boo's daughter.

**Authors note: Ideas, i need ideas and comments please! The story is actually going somewhere now!**


	3. Chapter 3

I often wondered about pain.

People's eyes reflect their pain. Like little pools of water sitting still by the roadside. Lost. Forgotten. Their murky hollows shallow yet deep.

Boo's eyes. A murky blue color like the sky as it fades to black. As it becomes a backdrop for those thousands of balls of light. The stars.

His eyes, so deep and mournful, the entire mysterious universe themselves. They gripped me with such intensity, secrets of the world locked inside.

I felt his pain. It flooded his entire being, pouring out of his bottomless eyes.

His pain flooded the mysterious black velvet carpet of the universe of which his eyes held.

I sunk into them, staring, twirling deeper and deeper into the very ends of his eyes. Of the universe.

Boo Radley's pain was mountainous.

Yet as I stared I found that it was not pain in those impossibly cavernous eyes.

It was immeasurable regret.


End file.
